Moving materialities: Oceanic epistemologies and embodied knowledge production in Pentecostal women's health mentorship in Samoa

Abstract

This article employs Oceanic epistemological theories to explore the body as a site of knowledge production among Samoan Pentecostal women as they dance in a church‐sponsored Zumba session, tracking foods, words, and feelings: I call these moving materialities. In their work together, these women contextualized health, sickness, and weight as generated from the circulation of these kinds of moving materialities. Their work theorizing health through material change is quite different from those imagined and circulated in the literatures on diabetes and obesity. The article orients critical studies of health toward an interrogation of the dynamic qualities of materiality, including both the moving body and materials that move between or within bodies. By expanding what might be considered material and movement in the context of health, this article offers an alternative to theories of metabolism that have come to dominate how we understand the body in terms energy expenditure. Ultimately, this approach calls for anthropologists to consider the circumstances in which theory is understood to be “culturally specific” or “generalizable.”

Can There Be a Feminist Ethnography of the Undersea?

“…Over the past ten years, many social scientists have emphasized the heuristics of the marine environment when seeking to understand, for instance, how oceans have been historically linked to human societies through the generation of ecological crises (as in “marine sociology”: Crockford 2020; Hannigan 2017; Longo and Clark 2019), how colonial and capitalist politics of seas and oceans persist today (e.g., Khalili 2020), how environmental history benefits from Indigenous knowledge of the sea (as in “oceanic epistemologies”: Hardin 2023; Shu, Heim, and Johnson 2019), how the land–sea separation has shaped Western modernity (Campling and Colás 2021), and even how underwater cables materialize histories of land–sea geographies and politics (Starosielski 2015). Diving activities as such have been investigated by anthropologists for how they unveil social dynamics of otherness, body techniques, and affects (e.g., Raveneau 2021, in the case of coral fishermen).…”